Rajasthan: Location, Extent and Physiography

Almost every other fact in this unit hangs off this chapter. Where the Aravalli runs decides the rainfall, which decides the soil, which decides the crop, which decides the district. Learn the physiography properly and a large part of the rest of the syllabus becomes derivable rather than memorised.

1. Location and extent

TextbookGovtSources: Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education, Rajasthan Adhyayan (Class 9, physical-environment chapter, and Class 12, geographical-regions chapter; lead author Dr Hukam Chand Jain), read directly from the volumes. A printed textbook has no stable link, so it is cited in full rather than linked. The area of 342,239 sq km, the latitudinal and longitudinal extent and the 1,070 km international border were verified independently of the textbook. The India State of Forest Report 2023 gives the extent as 23°4′ to 30°11′ N and 69°29′ to 78°17′ E, differing by one minute of arc at each end of the latitude — below the precision any question can turn on. ISFR 2023.

Note that the state is wider than it is tall — 869 km across against 826 km down. It is a small thing and it is set, because the intuition from the map's shape runs the other way.

The Tropic of Cancer detail is the one most often lost. It does not cross the middle of the state; it clips the southern districts of Banswara and Dungarpur. That is why the far south is the only part of Rajasthan that is tropical in the strict sense, and why Banswara's climate reads differently from Bikaner's.

What the state's own current documents say

The Economic Review 2025-26, published with Budget 2026-27, opens with a Profile of Rajasthan, and it is the single most quotable paragraph in this chapter because RPSC draws numbers from that document by figure.

GovtSource: Government of Rajasthan, Economic Review 2025-26 (Directorate of Economics and Statistics, published with Budget 2026-27), Executive Summary, "Profile of Rajasthan", read directly. The same document states 41 districts and 7 divisional headquarters in several chapters, which independently corroborates the administrative position set out in section 2.

Three things in that table are worth holding against what this page already says.

The share is 10.41 per cent in the current Economic Review, not 10.4. The chapter above gives 10.4% because that is what RPSC keyed in 2016, and for a Prelims option RPSC's own key governs. But the state's live economic document rounds it the other way, and a Mains answer that writes 10.41% is quoting the Government of Rajasthan. The square kilometres are identical in both; only the rounding differs.

The shape is "rhomboid". The textbooks say vishamkon chaturbhuj, an irregular quadrilateral; the Economic Review says rhomboid. These are two renderings of the same received description, and either is safe.

The distance to the sea is a fact nothing else on this page supplies. Rajasthan is landlocked, and about 225 km separates its southern edge from the Gulf of Kutch. That is short enough to matter: it is the reason the south-west receives moisture the far west does not, and it is the sort of number that appears in a question about why Rajasthan is arid despite lying near a sea.

The extent, checked against the state's own map

Every figure in the table at the top of this chapter comes from printed sources. They can also be tested directly, because the Government of Rajasthan publishes its administrative geometry: RajDhara, the state GIS run by the Department of Information Technology and Communications, serves the current tehsil boundaries as polygons. Measuring the outer edge of those 426 polygons gives the state's extent independently of any book.

GovtSource: derived from the RajDhara tehsil polygon layer of the Government of Rajasthan state GIS, run by DOITC and reached through the citizen portal rajdharaa.rajasthan.gov.in; 426 tehsil polygons across 41 districts, in EPSG:4326, archived 16 August 2026. The layer carries no version stamp, so it is quoted with the date it was taken. The method is the bounding box of the union of all 426 polygons, and the district and tehsil each extreme falls in. These are measurements from a published boundary file, not published figures, and are given to the nearest minute of arc for that reason.

The measurement settles two of the three disagreements this chapter records, and it settles them the way the chapter already argues.

The western limit measures 69° 29′ E, not 69° 30′. That agrees with the textbook's body text, with the office of the Resident Commissioner and with the India State of Forest Report 2023, against the textbook's own map. Three printed sources and the state's boundary file now say 69° 29′.

The southern limit measures 23° 03′ N. The Resident Commissioner's 23° 30′ is not merely improbable, it is contradicted by the state's own geometry by twenty-seven minutes of arc, close to fifty kilometres.

The eastern limit measures 78° 16′ E, where the printed sources give 78° 17′. The difference is under a minute of arc and below the precision any question turns on. It is recorded rather than used to overturn anything.

From the extent, three derived figures that are set directly.

• Latitudinal extent: 7° 09′ — 30° 12′ minus 23° 03′.
• Longitudinal extent: 8° 48′ on 69° 29′, or 8° 47′ on the widely printed 69° 30′. The extent you compute depends on which western value you took, which is why the two figures both circulate and why neither is a misprint.
• The state is 43 km wider than it is tall — 869 minus 826. The number, not just the fact, has been asked.

How far the Tropic of Cancer actually runs

The Tropic of Cancer lies at about 23° 26′ N. Laid across the state's tehsil polygons, it enters Rajasthan in the south and runs about 85 km inside the state, of which about 60 km lies in Banswara and about 25 km in Dungarpur.

GovtSource: derived from the RajDhara tehsil polygon layer described above, by intersecting the 23° 26′ N parallel with the tehsil polygons. Distances are computed, not published, and are given to the nearest five kilometres.

This matters for two reasons.

It confirms both districts. The Rajasthan Foundation's Geography page names only Banswara; the textbooks name Banswara and Dungarpur. The measurement supports the textbooks, and shows why the Foundation's shorter form is understandable: two-thirds of the run is in Banswara.

And it explains a number in circulation. Preparation material says the Tropic runs "about 26 km" through Rajasthan. That is the Dungarpur stretch alone, not the state total, which is roughly three times longer. A figure that describes part of a thing is not wrong so much as mislabelled, and this one is mislabelled everywhere.

The borders

GovtTextbookSources: Government of Rajasthan pages for the 1,070 km international boundary and the four border districts (Sri Ganganagar, Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Barmer); Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education, Rajasthan Adhyayan (Class 9, physical-environment chapter, and Class 12, geographical-regions chapter; lead author Dr Hukam Chand Jain), read directly from the volumes. A printed textbook has no stable link, so it is cited in full rather than linked.

Four districts touch the Pakistan border: Sri Ganganagar, Bikaner, Jaisalmer and Barmer. Learn them as a north-to-south run, because that is the order they occur in and the order an option will scramble.

The border lengths

The 1,070 km international boundary is stated by the Government of Rajasthan itself. The individual inter-state lengths below are not carried on a state government page that could be found, and are given from the material in general circulation, marked as such:

UnverifiedGovtThe 1,070 km Pakistan boundary is stated by the Government of Rajasthan. The individual inter-state border lengths and their total are from general circulation — no state government source was located for them, nor for the naming of the Pakistan boundary as the Radcliffe Line. They are labelled on the face of the table rather than in a footnote. The set was at least checked for internal consistency: its components sum exactly to the stated total.

The inter-state set is at least internally consistent, which is the most that can be said for it: 1,600 + 1,262 + 1,022 + 877 + 89 = 4,850, matching the stated total. Not every version of this table in circulation adds up, and one that does not should be discarded.

Two superlatives carry the marks. Madhya Pradesh has the longest inter-state border and Punjab the shortest, and the gap is enormous — 1,600 km against 89.

The Pakistan stretch is the Radcliffe Line, the boundary drawn at Partition, so this fact can arrive as history rather than geography.

Two governments give two different lengths for the same border, and both are official.

GovtSource: Ministry of Home Affairs, Annual Report 2013-14, Chapter III, tables on fencing and floodlighting along the Indo-Pakistan border as on 31.03.2014, read directly: Rajasthan's total border length 1037 km, fenced 1048.27 km. The 3,323 km total for the India-Pakistan border is repeated in MHA's Annual Report 2023-24 and on the Border Management-I Division page, but neither carries the state-wise split, so the state figure is quoted from the 2013-14 report and dated accordingly.

Do not average them and do not pick one. A state's own boundary claim and the Union Home Ministry's border-management measurement are different exercises, and RPSC has always keyed the state's figure. Write 1,070 km in a Rajasthan paper. Know that the Union government's operational figure is 1,037 km, and know that 1,048 km, which also circulates, is the length of fence and not the length of border at all.

What lies on the other side is stated by the state government. The Rajasthan Foundation's Geography page says the state is bounded on the north-west and west by Pakistan's Punjab and Sindh provinces.

GovtSource: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan Foundation — Geography.

Four border districts, not five, and the test that settles it

Preparation material now in circulation adds Phalodi to the list and makes it five, on the reasoning that Phalodi was carved partly out of Jaisalmer in 2023 and survived the December 2024 abolitions. It does not touch the border.

The test is simple and it uses the state's own boundary file. Run a line west at every latitude from the Gujarat trijunction to the Punjab border, and record which district's territory is reached first. That district is the one on the frontier at that latitude.

GovtSource: derived from the RajDhara tehsil polygon layer of the Government of Rajasthan state GIS (archived 16 August 2026), by scanning westward at 0.005° intervals of latitude. Phalodi does not appear at any latitude. Its westernmost point is at 71° 43′ E, with Jaisalmer's Ramgarh, Sam and Pokaran tehsils lying between it and Pakistan — a gap of well over a hundred kilometres. The four names on this page stand.

Learn why the wrong answer is attractive, because that is what protects you. Phalodi took territory from Jodhpur and a strip from Jaisalmer, and a candidate who knows the second half of that sentence and not the first will promote it to the border. A district can be carved partly out of a border district without inheriting any of the border.

A warning about district-wise border lists. Lists of which districts touch which neighbouring state circulate widely and most are keyed to the fifty-district configuration of 2023 to December 2024 — they name Neem Ka Thana and Sanchore, both abolished on 28 December 2024. This page does not reproduce a district-wise list it cannot verify against the current forty-one-district map. If you meet one, check its date before learning it.

2. Administrative divisions — the current position

This is the part of the chapter where the standard textbooks are out of date, and the difference is large enough to cost a mark.

GovtTextbookThe current position — 7 divisions and 41 districts — follows the state cabinet's decision of 28 December 2024 abolishing nine districts and dissolving three divisions, verified independently of the textbooks. The textbooks give 33 districts and 241 tehsils; those figures are superseded and are shown here only as superseded. The current tehsil count is 425, from the Rajasthan Board of Revenue's SDO-wise tehsil enumeration (as updated 22-01-2026), whose own Grand Total is 41 districts, 323 sub-divisions and 425 tehsils — a figure that its per-district totals and its running serial numbers both confirm. The RajDhara state GIS layer carries 426 tehsil polygons, one more than the roster lists, so the two do not agree exactly and this page no longer says they do; the administrative count is the Board of Revenue's 425. Textbook: Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education, Rajasthan Adhyayan (Class 9, physical-environment chapter, and Class 12, geographical-regions chapter; lead author Dr Hukam Chand Jain), read directly from the volumes. A printed textbook has no stable link, so it is cited in full rather than linked.

What happened. Seventeen new districts and three new divisions were created under the previous state government. On 28 December 2024 the state cabinet abolished nine of those districts and dissolved the three new divisions, taking the state to its present 7 divisions and 41 districts.

The nine districts abolished on 28 December 2024: Anupgarh, Dudu, Gangapur City, Jaipur Rural, Jodhpur Rural, Kekri, Neem Ka Thana, Sanchore and Shahpura.

The three divisions dissolved: Pali, Banswara and Sikar.

The seven divisions now are: Ajmer, Bharatpur, Bikaner, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota and Udaipur.

Which districts sit in which division

The chapter above names the seven divisions. The examiner asks which districts are in them, and that question has a clean answer on the current map.

GovtSource: Government of Rajasthan master data at rajmasters.rajasthan.gov.in and the RajDhara state GIS tehsil layer, which returns the same 41 districts grouped into the same 7 divisions; corroborated by the Board of Revenue's SDO-wise Tehsil list, updated 22 January 2026, whose enumeration runs from district 1 to district 41. RajDhara spells Balotra as "Balotara"; the spelling in general use is Balotra.

Four superlatives follow from the table and from measuring the polygons, and all four are the kind of thing a single option turns on.

GovtSource: areas computed from the RajDhara tehsil polygons (archived 16 August 2026) on the WGS-84 ellipsoid. The seven divisional areas sum to 3,42,987 sq km against the official 3,42,239, a difference of 0.2 per cent that reflects boundary generalisation in the published polygons. These are derived figures, not published ones, and are quoted to the nearest hundred square kilometres for that reason.

One structural fact is worth more than the four superlatives together. Ajmer division touches every other division in the state. Bharatpur, Bikaner, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota and Udaipur each border exactly three of the others; Ajmer borders all six. That is not a coincidence of drawing. Ajmer is the pivot of the state, which is why it has served as a divisional headquarters through every reorganisation and why the geographical centre of Rajasthan is placed in this belt.

And two divisions carry the international border: Bikaner division, through Sri Ganganagar and Bikaner, and Jodhpur division, through Jaisalmer and Barmer.

The largest and the smallest district

The largest is not in doubt. The smallest changed in 2023 and most material has not caught up.

GovtSource: computed from the RajDhara tehsil polygons (archived 16 August 2026). No Government of Rajasthan table of district areas on the 41-district map was located, which is why these are measurements rather than quotations. The gap between Khairthal-Tijara and Deeg is about 125 sq km, roughly six per cent, comfortably larger than the measurement's likely error but small enough that it should be quoted as "smallest, by a short head" rather than as a round number.

Two answers are in circulation for the smallest district and both are stale. Dholpur answers the pre-2023 map, and this chapter has said so from the start. Deeg is now widely taught, and it is the runner-up, not the winner. Khairthal-Tijara, carved from Alwar in 2023 and retained in the December 2024 cull, is the smallest district of Rajasthan on the current map.

The order in which the districts were made

The chapter above begins at 28 December 2024. A chronology question begins much earlier, and the dates that circulate for it are not all right.

GovtSource: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan Foundation district profiles, each sourced on its own first page to the District Census Handbook 2011, Part XII-A: Baran, Rajsamand, Karauli, Pratapgarh. These profiles contain demonstrable typographical errors elsewhere — the Pratapgarh profile prints latitudes that would place the district in Sri Ganganagar — so they are used here only for the formation sentences, which are prose rather than tabulated figures.

The Karauli conflict is the instructive one, and it is probably not a conflict at all. The state's document says the district was established on 1 March 1997; the date taught everywhere is 19 July 1997. Both dates are attached to real events: an announcement, a notification and an inauguration are three separate things, and the gap between the first and the last was four and a half months. Where a question gives a single date for the creation of a district, it is quoting one of those three moments without saying which. This page carries the state document's date and records the other.

The one date to carry without hesitation is Pratapgarh, 26 January 2008, the 33rd district — because it is the fixed point from which the whole 2023 reorganisation is counted, and because the state's own profile states the number as well as the date.

Two traps follow from this and both are live.

The division count is 7 both before and after — because the three that were dissolved were themselves recent additions, and the state reverted to its long-standing seven. A question on the number of divisions has the same answer in an old book and a new one; a question on districts does not. That asymmetry is exactly what makes the district figure dangerous: the surrounding text looks correct.

And the abolished names are still in circulation. A district that existed for about eighteen months and was then abolished is precisely the sort of thing an examiner sets, in either direction — as a district that no longer exists, or as one that once did.

3. Relief: the four classes by altitude

Rajasthan's surface is classified by height above sea level, and the share of the state's area in each class is the examinable part — not merely the names.

TextbookSource: Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education, Rajasthan Adhyayan (Class 9, physical-environment chapter, and Class 12, geographical-regions chapter; lead author Dr Hukam Chand Jain), read directly from the volumes. A printed textbook has no stable link, so it is cited in full rather than linked. The four relief classes, their altitude bands and percentage shares are the textbook's own. No Government of Rajasthan page was found giving the same four-class split with percentages, so this table rests on the textbook rather than on a government source.

Read the first and last rows together, because the contrast is the whole geography of the state. More than half of Rajasthan lies between 150 and 300 metres, and less than one per cent rises above 900. The state that is defined in the popular imagination by its hill forts is, by area, overwhelmingly flat.

The high peaks

Guru Shikhar, at 1,722 m, is the highest peak of the Aravalli — and of Rajasthan.

Other high peaks of the southern Aravalli named alongside it: Ser, Achalgarh, Delwara, Abu, Jarga and Kumbhalgarh.

They are all southern. The Aravalli is highest in the south-west and loses height as it runs north-east, which is why the peaks cluster around Sirohi and Udaipur and why there is nothing comparable near Alwar.

The descending order of peaks has been set directly. After Guru Shikhar, RPSC's key gives the sequence Ser > Jarga > Sajjangarh > Taragarh (Prelims 2016, Q24). Learn it as a chain rather than as four separate heights, because that is the form the question takes.

The mountain ranges

The entire Aravalli range falls in the 600–900 m class, running south-west to north-east through the middle of the state, and — the word matters — discontinuously.

Its greatest extent is from Sirohi, Udaipur and Rajsamand up to Ajmer. Beyond Ajmer, through Jaipur and Alwar, the ranges become broken and scattered.

That single fact explains the rainfall map. A continuous barrier in the south-west wrings out the monsoon; a broken one in the north-east does not stop it, and does not shelter what lies behind it either.

The state government describes the range in terms the textbook does not, and they are more useful.

GovtSource: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan State Biodiversity Board — Physiography of Rajasthan (Environment Department), for the course Guru Shikhar (Mount Abu), 1,722 m, to Khetri, the 60:40 division, and the arid north-west against the more fertile south-east. The length of about 692 km is the Rajasthan Foundation's figure.

That 60:40 split is the single most useful number in this chapter. It is not a fact about a mountain; it is the state's water divide expressed as a proportion. The Environment Department draws the consequence itself: the north-western 60% is arid and of limited productivity, the south-eastern 40% is more fertile and more varied. One range, and it allocates three-fifths of Rajasthan to the desert side.

Learn the terminal points as a pair — Guru Shikhar to Khetri — because they fix the direction. Guru Shikhar is also the highest point of the range, so the Aravalli is at its tallest exactly where it begins and dwindles as it runs north-east, which is why the ranges break up beyond Ajmer.

A correction to the length, and it is a correction to this page. The table above attaches "about 692 km" to a Guru Shikhar-to-Khetri course, following the Rajasthan Foundation's wording. That length does not belong to a course inside Rajasthan. The Supreme Court, in the order this chapter's Nowadays section reports, defines the Aravallis as "the continuous geological ridge extending from Gujarat to Delhi", and the Union Environment Ministry's Aravalli Green Wall Project works on that same four-state range, describing an Aravalli hills landscape spanning over six million hectares across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi. The figure near 692 to 700 km is the whole ridge across four states and one Union Territory. Only part of it lies in Rajasthan.

GovtSources: PIB factsheet, Aravalli Hills, 21 December 2025, quoting the Supreme Court's order of 20 November 2025 on "the entire Aravalis, i.e., understood as the continuous geological ridge extending from Gujarat to Delhi"; PIB, Aravalli Green Wall Project launch, 25 March 2023 for the four states and the six-million-hectare landscape.

How much of the ridge is in Rajasthan is not settled here. A figure of 550 km circulates and no government source for it could be found. What can be said, and is enough for an answer, is that the range runs from Gujarat through Rajasthan and Haryana into Delhi, that its greatest height and its greatest continuity are both in Rajasthan, and that the whole-range length is not a Rajasthan figure.

Uplands and plateau

Spread on both sides of the Aravalli, from north-east to south-west, and in the south-eastern plateau.

• The north-eastern part is largely level, average height about 400 m.
• The south-western part is upland with a rugged surface, average height about 500 m.
• The Hadoti plateau lies in the south-east; plateau country also occurs in Chittorgarh and Pratapgarh.

The plains

The largest class, and it is two quite different things under one heading:

1. The sandy desert region of western Rajasthan.
2. The eastern plains — containing the Banas basin, the Chambal basin and the Chhappan plain (the middle Mahi basin).

The eastern plains are river-built and are the most suitable land in the state for agriculture. Same altitude class, opposite agricultural value — which is why "plains" on its own is never a sufficient answer about Rajasthan.

3A. What lies under the relief

Everything above this line describes the surface. Two things beneath it are examinable, and both have primary sources.

The Great Boundary Fault

Rajasthan has one named structural line, and it is the seam between the two halves of the state's geology. The Great Boundary Fault marks the north-western limit of the Vindhyan basin, separating the ancient Aravalli terrain to the north-west from the Vindhyan sediments of the south-east. It runs through south-eastern Rajasthan, and the Geological Survey of India has declared one of its exposures a national monument.

PrimaryGovtSources: for the structure, B. Rajendra Prasad and V. Vijaya Rao (National Geophysical Research Institute), "Deep seismic reflection study over the Vindhyans of Rajasthan: implications for geophysical setting of the basin", Journal of Earth System Science 115(1), 2006, pp. 135-147 (Indian Academy of Sciences), read directly. For the declaration, PIB, Ministry of Mines, "Geo-Heritage Sites", 9 March 2016, the annexure to a Rajya Sabha reply listing the state-wise geo-heritage sites and national geological monuments declared by GSI.

Note the district, because preparation material gets it wrong. The GSI's protected exposure is at Satur in Bundi, not at Begun in Chittorgarh. The fault itself runs across several districts of south-eastern Rajasthan and has been studied at Chittorgarh, Bundi and Bhilwara; the monument is in Bundi.

This bears on a question this chapter reproduces and does not answer. RPSC's deleted Prelims 2023 question offered "Satur — Central Aravalli" as one of its pairs. The name Satur, in the Government of India's own geological register, belongs to a locality in Bundi, on the Great Boundary Fault, in the Hadoti country rather than the Aravalli. That does not supply an answer to a question RPSC withdrew and this page still asserts none. It does show how far the sources on that question's material had drifted apart.

The sites the Geological Survey of India has declared

When the Ministry of Mines last published a state-wise list, Rajasthan held more declared geo-heritage sites than any other state: ten of the thirty-two on it. No state came close; the next largest holdings were four each. They are also a compressed geological history of the state, which is why they are worth learning as a set rather than as trivia.

GovtSource: PIB, Ministry of Mines, "Geo-Heritage Sites", 9 March 2016, the annexure to a Rajya Sabha reply by the Minister of Mines and Steel, read directly. The method is simply to count the annexure: it enumerates 32 sites across 13 states, of which 10 are the Rajasthan entries above, against 4 each for Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The annexure's district names are reproduced as it prints them, and they are the districts as they stood in 2016. This is the most recent state-wise enumeration reachable from a central government source, and it is a 2016 file — see the paragraph below, and the Sources note, for what has been added since.

Read the column of districts and the physiography reappears. Pali, Ajmer and Udaipur carry the Aravalli's old crystalline rocks; Jodhpur carries the Malani volcanics that underlie the western desert; Jaisalmer carries marine and Jurassic sediment; Bundi carries the fault where the Aravalli story stops and the Vindhyan story begins. The geo-heritage map and the physiographic map are the same map.

Ramgarh crater, declared in 2024

The list above is a 2016 snapshot and the state has added to it since. On 16 March 2024 the Government of Rajasthan declared the Ramgarh Crater a National Geo-Heritage Site, in consultation with the Geological Survey of India, by a notification of the Department of Environment and Climate Change published in the Rajasthan Gazette Extraordinary.

GovtSource: Government of Rajasthan, Department of Environment and Climate Change, Notification S.O. 579, Jaipur, 16 March 2024, published in the Rajasthan Gazette Extraordinary, Part 4(ga), Sub-section II, 19 March 2024, pp. 1144-1146 (file F 8(4) ENV/2023/Part-1, by order of the Governor, Monali Sen, Special Secretary), read in full from the scanned gazette. Its operative sentence is "the State Government declares the Ramgarh Crater as a National Geo-Heritage Site in consultation with Geological Survey of India." The geological map it reproduces is credited to Kenkmann, Wulf and Agarwal, 2019.

Three things about this notification are examinable and none of them is the crater itself.

It is a state declaration made in consultation with GSI, not a GSI declaration. That is the wording of the gazette, and it is a different mechanism from the sites in the 2016 annexure.

The crater carries three protections at once — geo-heritage site, conservation reserve under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, and a notified wetland inside it under the 2017 Rules. A question asking under which law Ramgarh is protected has more than one true answer, and the safest response names the instrument the question is about.

And two very different diameters are both correct, because they measure different things. The notification gives about 3.2 km, which is the ring you can see: the annular collar of raised rock, some 200 m high, standing around the central depression. The scientific description of the same site gives about 10 km, because the collar is not the crater rim at all — it is the outer part of the structure's central uplift, and the true crater rim lies well outside it, exposed as a low-angle normal fault traceable in satellite imagery.

PrimarySource: Thomas Kenkmann, Gerwin Wulf and Amar Agarwal, "Ramgarh, Rajasthan, India: A 10 km diameter complex impact structure", Meteoritics & Planetary Science 55(4), 2020, pp. 936-961, doi:10.1111/maps.13454, which reports planar deformation features in quartz confirming the impact origin and finds that "the annular collar does not mark the crater rim but represents the outer part of a central uplift" of an approximately 10 km structure, with a stratigraphic uplift of about 1,000 m. These are the authors the state's own gazette credits for its geological map.

So an option offering 3 km and a source offering 10 km are not contradicting each other. On a Rajasthan paper, quote the state's own notification — about 3.2 km — and know that the 10 km figure belongs to the impact structure as a whole.

One claim about Ramgarh does not survive, and it is the one most often repeated. It is regularly called India's, or Rajasthan's, first notified geo-heritage site. It cannot be: the Ministry of Mines' 2016 annexure already lists ten Rajasthan sites, and Akal Fossil Wood Park among them was recognised decades earlier. Ramgarh is a recent addition to a long-standing list, not the beginning of one.

The Jaisalmer basin and the oldest of its kind in the world

Akal Fossil Wood Park is the state's most visited piece of deep time, and the rock around it produced something rarer. In 2023, scientists of the Geological Survey of India and IIT Roorkee described Tharosaurus indicus, a new sauropod dinosaur, from Middle Jurassic strata of the Jaisalmer basin. Its stratigraphic age makes it the earliest known diplodocoid anywhere in the world.

PrimarySource: Sunil Bajpai, Debajit Datta, Pragya Pandey, Triparna Ghosh, Krishna Kumar and Debasish Bhattacharya, "Fossils of the oldest diplodocoid dinosaur suggest India was a major centre for neosauropod radiation", Scientific Reports 13, 2023 (authors at the Department of Earth Sciences, IIT Roorkee, and the Geological Survey of India at Jaipur, Raipur and Kolkata), read directly at PMC10403599. The paper's own words are "Middle Jurassic (early–middle Bathonian) strata of Jaisalmer Basin" and "its stratigraphic age makes it the earliest known diplodocoid globally"; the early-to-middle Bathonian is about 167 million years ago. The article carries a published correction (Sci Rep 13, 13602, 21 August 2023).

Say "earliest known diplodocoid", not "oldest dinosaur". The claim is about a clade, not about age in general, and preparation material routinely inflates it. Akal's fossil wood is Jurassic too, and the two together are why the Jaisalmer basin, not the Aravalli, is where Rajasthan's deep time is actually read.

How much of the state is degraded

Rajasthan's aridity is not only a climate fact, it is a measured one, and the measurement is national, dated and repeated on the same method three times.

GovtSource: Space Applications Centre, ISRO, Ahmedabad, Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas of India, released 17 June 2021, state-wise tables, read directly from the atlas PDF (a large file, about 95 MB). The release is confirmed by PIB, 17 June 2021, which states that the Atlas gives state-wise degraded area for 2018-19 with change analysis back to 2003-05. The all-India figure for 2018-19 in the same table is 9,78,54,851 hectares, or 29.77% of the country.

Two things in that table are worth more than the headline number.

Rajasthan's share fell slightly across the three periods while India's rose — 63.19 to 62.90 to 62.06 for the state, against 28.76 to 29.32 to 29.77 for the country. The state with the desert is one of the few whose degraded share is not growing.

And quote the period, not the publication year. 62.06% is the 2018-19 figure in an atlas published in 2021. Material that writes "62.06% as of 2021" has collapsed a measurement year into a release year, which is the commonest way a dated figure goes wrong.

4. The geographical regions

A geographical region is an area with enough uniformity in relief, climate, natural vegetation and soil that its economic and social character is broadly uniform too. Several schemes exist, and knowing which scheme a question is drawn from matters more than knowing any one of them.

The standard four-fold division

This is the division ordinarily used, and the one to give unless a question names a scholar:

1. The Desert region (Marusthaliya Pradesh)
2. The Aravalli hill region
3. The Plains region
4. The South-eastern plateau region — the Hadoti region

The state's current Economic Review uses exactly this four-fold division, and attaches an economic character to each. That is the form to give in a Mains answer, because it moves from landform to consequence.

GovtSource: Government of Rajasthan, Economic Review 2025-26, Executive Summary, "Profile of Rajasthan", read directly.

The sequence is the point. The driest region is the most valuable one for energy and minerals; the wettest is the most valuable for food. A four-fold division learnt as four names is inert. Learnt as four economies, it answers half the questions in this unit — why solar parks are in Jaisalmer and Bikaner, why the mineral chapter keeps returning to the Aravalli, why the eastern plains carry the population.

The sub-regions RPSC names

Prelims 2024 tested sub-region names that none of the four-fold schemes above contains, and they are worth holding separately because they are the vocabulary the examiner used:

GovtTextbookSources: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan Foundation — Topographical divisions and Geography; Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education, Rajasthan Adhyayan (Class 9, physical-environment chapter, and Class 12, geographical-regions chapter; lead author Dr Hukam Chand Jain), read directly from the volumes. A printed textbook has no stable link, so it is cited in full rather than linked.

The Nagaur entry is the one that repays thought. Inland drainage means the water has nowhere to go — no outlet to the sea — so it evaporates where it stands and leaves its salt behind. The salt lakes are not a separate fact from the drainage; they are its consequence, which is why Sambhar and its neighbours sit where they do.

And the same question established a limit that is easy to overstate. It is NOT correct that the Aravalli is rich in all types of minerals. The Aravalli is rich in metallic minerals specifically — a distinction Prelims has now tested from both directions.

The Rajasthan Foundation's four divisions, with areas

The state's own Rajasthan Foundation gives a four-fold topographical division and attaches percentages to two of them:

GovtSource: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan Foundation — Topographical divisions, with Geography. The Foundation attaches percentages to only two of its four divisions, and the district lists are reproduced as it prints them, including Pali printed as Palo.

The Environment Department's six divisions

A different arm of the same government divides the state six ways rather than four, and its scheme is the one to quote when a question asks about physiography rather than regions:

• The north-western sandy tract, including the Thar Desert
• The south-eastern elevated region, 100–350 m above sea level
• The southern hilly Mewar tract
• The central tableland within Kota and Bundi districts
• The north-eastern badlands along the Chambal
• The flat alluvial plains of Bharatpur in the far north-east

Do not treat the disagreement as an error. The Foundation is dividing the state for planning and tourism; the Environment Department is dividing it by landform. The first needs whole districts, which is why its lists are district names; the second follows terrain across district lines, which is why it can name badlands and tableland as units in their own right. A scheme is built for a purpose, and the purpose determines the boundaries.

Three regions the state government administers by name

Beyond the physiographic schemes, the Government of Rajasthan runs area development programmes named after three traditional regions. These are the only regional names in this chapter that carry an official definition, a district list and a budget line, which makes them safer to quote than any of the folk vocabulary that circulates alongside them.

GovtSource: Government of Rajasthan, Economic Review 2025-26, Rural Development chapter, read directly. The district lists are on the current 41-district map — the Magra entry names Beawar and the Mewat entry names Khairthal-Tijara and Deeg, all created in 2023 — so this is one of the few regional definitions in circulation that is not keyed to the old map.

Read the Dang definition again, because it is doing geography in the language of administration. A ravine is a landform; "infested by dacoits" is what that landform produced. The badlands along the Chambal are hard to police for the same reason they are hard to farm, and the state's own scheme document draws the line from one to the other. The eight districts of the Dang programme are, near enough, the districts the Chambal and its tributaries have cut.

Magra is the mirror image. It is defined by hills, by poor land and water, by heavy seasonal migration, and by a negative: it is the hill country that the Tribal Area Development programme does not cover. An administrative region can be defined by what it is not, and Magra is.

V. C. Mishra's seven regions, 1968

Prof. V. C. Mishra was the first to delineate geographical regions for Rajasthan, in his book Rajasthan ka Bhugol, published by the National Book Trust in 1968. He divided the state into seven regions.

TextbookSource: V. C. Mishra's seven-region scheme as reproduced in Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education, Rajasthan Adhyayan (Class 9, physical-environment chapter, and Class 12, geographical-regions chapter; lead author Dr Hukam Chand Jain), read directly from the volumes. A printed textbook has no stable link, so it is cited in full rather than linked. Reproduced exactly as printed. Jodhpur is in western Rajasthan and the Chambal does not reach it, so that pairing cannot be right; Dholpur is the likely intended district but has not been substituted, because correcting a source without evidence of what it meant to say is invention rather than correction. The Ram Lochan Singh (1971) and Tiwari and Saxena (1994) schemes are from the same volume.

Rows 1 and 3 are the pair to understand, because they separate on one variable only. The Western Arid region and the Canal region have the same rainfall, 15–25 cm. What distinguishes them is irrigation: the canal region is desert that receives water it does not get from the sky. Mishra is classifying by water available, not water fallen — and that is a better answer about the Indira Gandhi Canal's significance than any figure.

A misprint in row 7, carried as printed and flagged. The Chambal ravine region is given as Sawai Madhopur and Jodhpur. Jodhpur is in the far west of the state and has no Chambal ravines; the Chambal runs along Rajasthan's eastern edge. The intended district is almost certainly Dholpur, which is ravine country and appears in row 5. This page reproduces the table as printed and does not silently correct it, but a candidate should know that the pairing as printed is geographically impossible.

The other two schemes

• Prof. Ram Lochan Singh, 1971, regionalising India as a whole, divided Rajasthan into two macro-regions — Rajasthan and the Rajasthan Plateau — and then into four sub-regions and twelve micro-regions.
• Prof. Tiwari and Prof. Saxena, 1994, in Rajasthan ka Pradeshik Bhugol, worked from relief, climate and river basins, aligned these with administrative boundaries, and determined Rajasthan's major, minor, tertiary and micro regions.

Note what changes between the three schemes. Mishra classifies by climate and land use. Ram Lochan Singh classifies as part of an all-India scheme, so Rajasthan appears as a piece of something larger. Tiwari and Saxena deliberately reconcile physical regions with district boundaries — which is why theirs is the scheme that maps most easily onto administrative planning, and the least faithful to physical geography alone. Neither is more correct; they answer different questions, and an examiner naming a scholar is asking which question you think is being answered.

Nowadays — what changed in 2026

Covering 1 January to 23 August 2026, with the immediately preceding decisions that set the position. Updated every month until Prelims and Mains.

The Aravalli now has a single legal definition

This is the most consequential change to this subject in years, and it happened just before this window opened.

For decades "the Aravalli" had no uniform definition, and each state drew the line differently. The Supreme Court, on the recommendation of a Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change committee, settled it: all states adopt the criterion of "100 metres above local relief" — which had been in force in Rajasthan since 9 January 2006. Rajasthan's own rule became the national one.

GovtSource: PIB factsheet, Aravalli Hills: Protecting Ecology and Ensuring Sustainable Development (Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change), reporting the Supreme Court's acceptance of the committee's recommendation. The committee was led by MoEFCC with the forest secretaries of Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat, and representatives of the Forest Survey of India, the Central Empowered Committee and the Geological Survey of India. The criterion is stated to have been in force in Rajasthan since 09.01.2006.

Why a definition matters more than it sounds. The definition is written for one purpose — deciding where mining may not happen. Landforms inside those contours are excluded from mining leases. So a question about what counts as "the Aravalli" is now a question with a legal answer, and the answer is a contour rule, not a description of scenery.

A ban on new mining leases across the whole range

24 December 2025 — the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change directed the states to impose a complete ban on the grant of any new mining lease in the Aravallis, applied uniformly across the entire landscape from Gujarat to the National Capital Region, and treating the range as a continuous geological ridge.

Read the ban precisely, because its nature is the examinable part. It is an interim moratorium, not a permanent prohibition. It holds until the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) prepares a Management Plan for Sustainable Mining (MPSM) for the entire Aravalli region, which is to identify where mining may occur and where it must be prohibited, assess cumulative environmental impact and ecological carrying capacity, and set out restoration and rehabilitation measures. It is to be placed in the public domain for stakeholder consultation.

For mines already operating, the states were directed to enforce strict compliance with environmental safeguards in conformity with the Supreme Court's order — existing mines were not shut, they were tightened.

GovtSource: PIB, Centre will protect entire Aravallis; No Mining Leases; Protected Zone to be Expanded, 24 December 2025 (MoEFCC), read in full. ICFRE was additionally directed to identify further areas where mining should be prohibited, over and above those already prohibited.

No Management Plan for Sustainable Mining has been found published as of 23 August 2026. The moratorium therefore still stands on its own terms. Do not write that the plan exists — it was directed, and a direction is not a document.

Where the 100-metre rule came from, and what the Court added to it

The definition this chapter reports is Rajasthan's own, and the Supreme Court's committee did not adopt it unchanged.

Its origin. The 100 metres above local relief criterion comes from a 2002 committee report of the Government of Rajasthan, which relied on the Richard Murphy landform classification, and Rajasthan has followed it since 9 January 2006. When the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change consulted the four Aravalli states, only Rajasthan had a formally established definition at all.

What the committee changed. Rajasthan's definition protected hills and their supporting slopes. It contained no explicit protection for ranges. The committee added the range rule, required a scientifically robust and uniform method for determining local relief, and made marking on Survey of India maps mandatory before any mining is considered. The national rule is Rajasthan's rule made stricter.

The date to quote. The Supreme Court's final judgment is dated 20 November 2025. The PIB factsheet setting it out was posted on 21 December 2025.

One qualification on the prohibition that is easy to miss. Mining is barred in core and inviolate areas except for critical, strategic and atomic minerals — those notified in Part B and Part D of the First Schedule of the MMDR Act, 1957 — and minerals in that Act's Seventh Schedule. A blanket statement that no mining of any kind may occur in the core areas is wrong.

GovtSource: PIB factsheet, Aravalli Hills: Protecting Ecology and Ensuring Sustainable Development, 21 December 2025 (MoEFCC), read in full. The same factsheet records that the Aravallis have been "recognized across 37 districts by state governments".

14 January 2026 — the restoration side of the same landscape

The mining orders are the restrictive half of the Aravalli story. The Green Wall is the constructive half, and it moved inside this window.

On 14 January 2026 the Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change inaugurated the National Conference on Eco-restoration of the Aravalli Landscape in New Delhi and released a report, Eco-restoration of the Aravalli Landscape, prepared by the Sankala Foundation.

GovtSource: PIB, MoEFCC, 14 January 2026, read in full. Two district counts appear in official Aravalli material and they measure different things: the December 2025 factsheet says the Aravallis are recognised across 37 districts by the state governments; the Green Wall Project is being implemented in 29 districts. Recognition and implementation are not the same set.

Hold the pairing, because it is the answer to a Mains question rather than a Prelims one. In the space of eight weeks the Union government both froze new mining across the Aravallis and put a restoration figure on the same landscape. A judgment defines what may not be dug; a project defines what will be planted. Neither number is a result yet — 6.45 million hectares is land identified and 2.7 million is work initiated, and no completion figure has been published.

The census that will redraw the numbers has begun

1 April 2026 — Phase I of Census 2027 began. It matters here because Census 2011 counted 33 districts and Rajasthan now has 41, so the next census will be the first to report the state on its current administrative map. Phase II, Population Enumeration, falls in February 2027.

GovtSource: PIB, Census 2027: World's largest census exercise begins, 1 April 2026. Fuller treatment in the population chapter.

What has not changed

Rajasthan's area, extent and physiography are unchanged, as they should be — 342,239 sq km, 10.4% of India, the same four relief classes and the same Aravalli. Physical geography is the one part of this unit that does not rot, which is why the effort on this page goes into pinning down which figures are disputed rather than into re-checking them for freshness.

The administrative position is also unchanged since 28 December 2024 — 7 divisions and 41 districts, following the cabinet decision abolishing nine districts and dissolving three divisions. No further reorganisation has occurred in 2026.

What RPSC has actually asked

Six Prelims papers — 2013, 2016, 2018, 2021, 2023 and 2024 — carry the questions below on this chapter's material. They are reproduced from the official papers with RPSC's own answer keys, and they are the best available evidence of how this topic is set.

Important for RAS

Prelims Focus

• Extent — 23°3′ N to 30°12′ N, 69°29′ E to 78°17′ E (69°30′ is widely printed and may be the keyed option); Tropic of Cancer through Banswara and Dungarpur in the south
• Area 342,239 sq km, 10.4% of India (RPSC's key; 10.41% and 11% also circulate — see Sources), largest state by area; shape an irregular quadrilateral; north–south 826 km, east–west 869 km — wider than it is tall
• Pakistan border 1,070 km, touching Sri Ganganagar, Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Barmer; Punjab and Haryana north and north-east, UP and MP east, MP and Gujarat south-west
• Administratively 7 divisions and 41 districts (as of the reorganisation of 28 December 2024). Nine districts abolished — Anupgarh, Dudu, Gangapur City, Jaipur Rural, Jodhpur Rural, Kekri, Neem Ka Thana, Sanchore, Shahpura — and three divisions dissolved — Pali, Banswara, Sikar. The seven divisions: Ajmer, Bharatpur, Bikaner, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota, Udaipur. Older books give 33 districts and are superseded
• Relief by altitude — above 900 m: under 1% · 600–900 m: about 6% · 300–600 m: about 31% · 150–300 m: about 51%
• Guru Shikhar, 1,722 m, highest Aravalli peak; other southern peaks Ser, Achalgarh, Delwara, Abu, Jarga, Kumbhalgarh
• The Aravalli runs south-west to north-east and is discontinuous; greatest extent Sirohi–Udaipur–Rajsamand to Ajmer, breaking up through Jaipur and Alwar
• Eastern plains contain the Banas basin, Chambal basin and Chhappan plain (middle Mahi basin) — the most agriculturally suitable land in the state
• Border lengths — Pakistan 1,070 km, the Radcliffe Line, stated by the state government. In circulation without a state source: MP 1,600 km (longest), Haryana 1,262, Gujarat 1,022, UP 877, Punjab 89 (shortest), total inter-state 4,850 km
• District-wise border lists in circulation are mostly stale — they name Neem Ka Thana and Sanchore, abolished 28 December 2024
• Jaisalmer is the largest district, 38,401 sq km. The smallest is configuration-dependent — Dholpur (3,084 sq km) answers the older map
• The Aravalli, per the state government — runs Guru Shikhar (Mount Abu) in the south-west to Khetri in the north-east, about 692 km, and divides the state 60% north-west / 40% south-east, the north-west arid and the south-east more fertile
• Rajasthan Foundation's four divisions — Western Plain (largest), Aravalli Range, Eastern Plains about 23.3%, Hadoti Plateau about 9.6%
• Environment Department's six divisions — north-western sandy tract (Thar) · south-eastern elevated region, 100–350 m · southern hilly Mewar tract · central tableland in Kota and Bundi · north-eastern badlands along the Chambal · alluvial plains of Bharatpur
• The four standard regions — Desert, Aravalli hill, Plains, South-eastern plateau (Hadoti)
• V. C. Mishra, 1968, Rajasthan ka Bhugol, National Book Trust — seven regions. The Western Arid and Canal regions share the same rainfall (15–25 cm) and are separated by irrigation
• Ram Lochan Singh, 1971 — two macro-regions, four sub-regions, twelve micro-regions · Tiwari and Saxena, 1994 — physical regions reconciled with administrative boundaries
• Economic Review 2025-26's profile — 3,42,239 sq km, 10.41% of India, "rhomboid" shape, 869 km west-east and 826 km north-south, the south lying about 225 km from the Gulf of Kutch and 400 km from the Arabian Sea; population projected at 8.33 crore on 1 October 2025, sixth most populous state
• Derived extents — latitudinal 7° 09′; longitudinal 8° 48′ on 69° 29′ or 8° 47′ on 69° 30′; the state is 43 km wider than it is tall
• The Tropic of Cancer runs about 85 km inside Rajasthan — about 60 km in Banswara and about 25 km in Dungarpur, through Chikhli in Dungarpur. The "26 km" in circulation is the Dungarpur stretch alone
• Border length, two official figures — 1,070 km stated by the Government of Rajasthan; 1,037 km in the Ministry of Home Affairs' border-management table; 1,048 km is the length of fence, not of border. The border faces Pakistan's Punjab and Sindh provinces
• Four districts on the international border, not five — Sri Ganganagar, Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Barmer. Phalodi is not one of them; its westernmost point is over a hundred kilometres inside Jaisalmer
• Districts by division — Jodhpur 8, Jaipur 7, Udaipur 7, Ajmer 6, Bharatpur 5, Bikaner 4, Kota 4. Jodhpur is the largest division by area, Bharatpur the smallest. Ajmer borders all six other divisions; every other division borders exactly three. Bikaner and Jodhpur divisions carry the international border
• Largest district Jaisalmer. Smallest is now Khairthal-Tijara, about 2,020 sq km, ahead of Deeg at about 2,145. Dholpur answers the pre-2023 map and Deeg is the runner-up, not the winner
• District chronology from state documents — Baran and Rajsamand, 10 April 1991; Karauli, 1 March 1997 (19 July 1997 is the date in circulation and refers to a later step); Pratapgarh, 26 January 2008, the 33rd district
• The Great Boundary Fault — marks the north-western limit of the Vindhyan basin; a 30 km wide north-west dipping thrust; GSI's declared monument is "Great Boundary Fault at Satur, Bundi district"
• Rajasthan held ten of the thirty-two declared geo-heritage sites / national geological monuments in the Ministry of Mines' last state-wise list (2016), the most of any state — Sendra Granite and Barr Conglomerate (Pali), Jharmarkotra stromatolites and Rajpura-Dariba gossan (Udaipur), Bhojunda stromatolite park (Chittaurgarh), Akal Fossil Wood Park (Jaisalmer), Kishangarh nepheline syenite (Ajmer), Welded Tuff and the Jodhpur Group–Malani contact (Jodhpur), Great Boundary Fault at Satur (Bundi)
• Ramgarh crater was declared a National Geo-Heritage Site on 16 March 2024 by the Government of Rajasthan in consultation with GSI — Ramgarh village, Kishanganj tehsil, Baran district, diameter about 3.2 km in the notification and about 10 km for the impact structure in the research literature, estimated 165 million years old, already a conservation reserve with a notified wetland inside it. It is not India's or Rajasthan's first geo-heritage site, whatever is said of it
• Tharosaurus indicus, described in 2023 by GSI and IIT Roorkee from Middle Jurassic strata of the Jaisalmer basin, is the earliest known diplodocoid dinosaur in the world — a clade claim, not a claim to be the oldest dinosaur
• Desertification — 62.06% of Rajasthan was under desertification and land degradation in 2018-19 (SAC/ISRO Atlas, released 2021), down from 62.90% in 2011-13 and 63.19% in 2003-05, against an all-India 29.77% that is rising
• Three regions the state administers by name — Dang, ravine country, 2,192 villages in 8 districts; Magra, hill country outside the TAD area, 1,746 villages in Beawar, Bhilwara, Pali, Chittorgarh, Rajsamand; Mewat, 807 villages in 14 blocks of Alwar, Khairthal-Tijara and Deeg
• The Aravalli's ~692–700 km is the whole ridge from Gujarat to Delhi, not a Guru Shikhar-to-Khetri course inside Rajasthan. The 100 m above local relief rule is Rajasthan's own, from a 2002 state committee using the Richard Murphy classification, in force since 9 January 2006; the Supreme Court's judgment is dated 20 November 2025

Interview and Mains Angles

• More than half of Rajasthan lies between 150 and 300 metres and under one per cent above 900. How well does the popular image of Rajasthan as a land of hill forts match its actual relief?
• The Aravalli is continuous in the south-west and broken in the north-east. Trace what follows from that for rainfall, soil and settlement.
• Mishra separates the Western Arid region from the Canal region by irrigation alone, at identical rainfall. What does that tell you about how far engineering can substitute for climate, and what are the limits?
• Nine districts were created and abolished within about eighteen months. What does that episode suggest about the criteria on which administrative units ought to be drawn?

Aggregator Watch

Unresolved claims from this box are collected, with what was checked, on the Caution for Readers page.

Practice

• Practice: Rajasthan: Location, Extent and Physiography — 45 questions built from this chapter: 37 MCQs, 5 assertion-reason and 3 match-the-following, plus flashcards and rapid one-liners.
• Every RAS Prelims Geography question, 2013–2024 — all 78 official questions with RPSC's keys, worked explanations, the five RPSC deleted and why, and the topic weightage six papers reveal.

More in This Series

• Rajasthan's Climate: Characteristics, Regions and the Monsoon
• Soils of Rajasthan: Classification, Distribution and Soil Health
• Agriculture of Rajasthan: Crops, Zones and the State's Standing
• Tourism in Rajasthan: Sites, Visitors and the World Heritage Count
• Caution for Readers — the claims across this site that are genuinely unsettled

Sources & Verification

Written on 23 August 2026.

The structure of this chapter follows the Rajasthan Board's Rajasthan Adhyayan textbooks — the physical-environment chapter of the Class 9 volume and the geographical-regions chapter of the Class 12 volume, whose lead author is Dr Hukam Chand Jain. Taken from them: the latitudinal and longitudinal extent; the Tropic of Cancer passing through Banswara and Dungarpur; the area and its share of India; the shape and the north–south and east–west dimensions; the border description; the four relief classes with their altitude bands and percentage shares; Guru Shikhar and the other southern peaks; the discontinuous course of the Aravalli and its greatest extent; the composition of the eastern plains; the four standard geographical regions; and V. C. Mishra's seven-region table, together with the Ram Lochan Singh (1971) and Tiwari and Saxena (1994) schemes.

The administrative figures in those textbooks are superseded and are not carried as current. They give 33 districts and 241 tehsils. The current position — 7 divisions and 41 districts — follows the state cabinet's decision of 28 December 2024 abolishing nine districts and dissolving three divisions, and is verified independently of the textbooks. The current tehsil count is 425, against the textbooks' superseded 241, from the Rajasthan Board of Revenue's SDO-wise tehsil enumeration (as updated 22-01-2026), whose own Grand Total is 41 districts, 323 sub-divisions and 425 tehsils — a figure that its per-district totals and its running serial numbers both confirm. The RajDhara state GIS layer carries 426 tehsil polygons, one more than the roster lists, so the two do not agree exactly and this page no longer says they do; the administrative count is the Board of Revenue's 425. A question that gives 241 is working from the pre-2023 framework, and one that gives 33 districts is working from the framework before that. The superseded figure is shown on this page only as superseded.

Independently verified rather than taken on the textbook's word: the area of 342,239 sq km, the latitudinal and longitudinal extent, and the 1,070 km length of the international border, together with the identification of Sri Ganganagar, Bikaner, Jaisalmer and Barmer as the four border districts.

One discrepancy inside the source is resolved and stated. The Class 9 chapter's body text gives the western longitude as 69°29′ E, while the map printed on the same page gives 69°30′ E. 69°29′ is the value carried here, because three independent sources give it — the textbook's own body text, the office of the Resident Commissioner, and the India State of Forest Report 2023 — against the textbook's map alone for 69°30′. 69°30′ is nonetheless the figure most widely printed, with the textbook's internal disagreement recorded rather than hidden.

One misprint is carried openly. In Mishra's table the Chambal ravine region is given as Sawai Madhopur and Jodhpur. Jodhpur is in western Rajasthan and the Chambal does not reach it. The table is reproduced as printed, with the impossibility flagged in the text; Dholpur is the likely intended district but is not substituted, because that would be correcting a source without evidence of what it meant to say.

Government sources were used in preference to preparation material, and where only the latter exists the page says so on the face of the table rather than in a footnote.

Taken from Government of Rajasthan pages: the area of 342,239 sq km and the 10.4% share, Guru Shikhar at 1,722 m, the Aravalli running Guru Shikhar (Mount Abu) to Khetri and dividing the state 60% north-west to 40% south-east with the north-west arid and the south-east more fertile (Rajasthan Environment Department, State Biodiversity Board); the four topographical divisions with the Eastern Plains at about 23.3%, the Hadoti Plateau at about 9.6% and the Aravalli at about 692 km (Rajasthan Foundation); and the 1,070 km international boundary.

A variance inside the state government is recorded rather than averaged. Rajasthan's share of India's area is given as 10.4% by the Environment Department, 10.41% in the state textbooks and by the Economic Review 2025-26, and 11% by the office of the Resident Commissioner. The area in square kilometres is the same in all of them; only the rounding differs. The Economic Review's wording is worth having, because it pairs the land share with the water share in one sentence: Rajasthan holds over 10.41 per cent of India's landmass but merely 1.16 per cent of its water resources. This page still answers 10.4%, for the reason given in section 1: that is the figure RPSC's own key uses.

A conflict on the latitudinal extent, resolved by a test rather than by preferring a source. The office of the Resident Commissioner gives the extent as 23°30′ to 30°11′ N; the textbooks and general material give 23°3′ to 30°12′ N. The lower figure must be right, and it can be shown without appeal to authority: the Tropic of Cancer lies at about 23°26′ N and demonstrably passes through Banswara and Dungarpur in southern Rajasthan — which is stated by the state's own material and is not in dispute. A southern limit of 23°30′ would place the entire state north of the Tropic and make that impossible. This page therefore carries 23°3′, and notes that an official page prints otherwise.

A third set of coordinates, from a Government of India scientific body. The India State of Forest Report 2023 gives Rajasthan's extent as 23°4′ N to 30°11′ N and 69°29′ E to 78°17′ E. It agrees with the Resident Commissioner's office on the northern limit (30°11′) and on the longitude (69°29′), and refutes that office's southern limit of 23°30′. The remaining difference is one minute of arc at each end of the latitude — 23°3′ against 23°4′, and 30°12′ against 30°11′ — which is below the precision any question can turn on. This page keeps the textbook pair and records the Forest Survey's.

On the eastern longitude the textbook's own two figures disagree — 69°29′ E in its body text against 69°30′ E on its map. The Resident Commissioner's office gives 69°29′, which agrees with the textbook's text. This page carries 69°29′ on that basis, and records that 69°30′ is widely printed.

Given from general circulation, with no state government source found: the inter-state border lengths and their 4,850 km total, the naming of the Pakistan boundary as the Radcliffe Line, Jaisalmer's 38,401 sq km, and Dholpur's 3,084 sq km. These are marked as such where they appear. The inter-state set was at least checked for internal consistency — its components sum exactly to the stated total.

One figure this page previously left unsettled is now answered, with its basis stated. The smallest district of Rajasthan cannot be answered without fixing a date, because the 2023 creations and the December 2024 abolitions both change the field. Dholpur remains the answer keyed to the pre-2023 map. On the current 41-district map the answer is Khairthal-Tijara, ahead of the widely taught Deeg by a short head. Because no Government of Rajasthan table of district areas on the current map was located, this rests on measurement of the state's own boundary polygons, and it is stated as a measurement wherever it appears. It was also checked against published district areas from outside that file, which give the same ordering and a similar margin.

Not yet covered on this page and therefore not asserted: district-wise areas, the geology and age of the Aravalli, and the detailed sub-regions of Ram Lochan Singh's and Tiwari and Saxena's schemes. These belong with later chapters in this unit.

Revised on 29 August 2026. What follows was added or corrected in that revision.

1. The Government of Rajasthan's current Economic Review is now the lead source for the state profile. The Economic Review 2025-26, published with Budget 2026-27, was downloaded and read. Taken from its Executive Summary, "Profile of Rajasthan": the area of 3,42,239 sq km and the 10.41 per cent share; the description of the shape as "rhomboid"; the 869 km and 826 km dimensions; the distances of about 225 km to the Gulf of Kutch and 400 km to the Arabian Sea; the four-fold regional division with the economic character of each region; and the population projection of 8.33 crore as on 1 October 2025. The same document states 41 districts and 7 divisional headquarters across several chapters, which corroborates the administrative position independently of the December 2024 news record. Its Rural Development chapter is the source for the Dang, Magra and Mewat definitions, district lists, village counts and the ₹100 crore Dang provision for 2025-26.

2. The state's own boundary geometry has been used as a check on the printed extent. The RajDhara tehsil polygon layer of the Government of Rajasthan state GIS, run by DOITC and reachable through rajdharaa.rajasthan.gov.in — 426 tehsil polygons across 41 districts, EPSG:4326, archived 16 August 2026 — was measured directly. From it are derived: the extent of 69° 29′ E to 78° 16′ E and 23° 03′ N to 30° 12′ N with the district and tehsil at each extreme; the 85 km run of the Tropic of Cancer and its split between Banswara and Dungarpur; the finding that the western frontier at every latitude belongs to Barmer, Jaisalmer, Bikaner or Sri Ganganagar; the division areas; the district areas that make Khairthal-Tijara the smallest district; and the finding that Ajmer division borders all six others. These are measurements from a published boundary file, not published figures, and are labelled as such wherever they appear. The layer carries no version stamp of any kind, which is why it is always quoted with the date it was taken. The seven divisional areas sum to 3,42,987 sq km against the official 3,42,239, a 0.2 per cent difference that reflects boundary generalisation.

3. The Ministry of Home Affairs gives a different length for the international border, and both figures are now carried. MHA's Annual Report 2013-14, Chapter III, tabulates Rajasthan's Indo-Pakistan border at 1,037 km beside Punjab 553, the Jammu International Border 210 and Gujarat 508, and records 1,048.27 km of fence along Rajasthan's stretch, noting that the fence is longer than the border because of terrain and alignment. MHA's Annual Report 2023-24 and the Border Management-I Division page repeat the 3,323 km national total but carry no state-wise split, so the 1,037 figure is quoted from the 2013-14 report and dated to it. The Government of Rajasthan's 1,070 km is not withdrawn. Both are printed with the basis of each, and the widely circulated 1,048 km is identified as a fence length rather than a border length.

4. A live error in circulation is refuted rather than repeated. Preparation material now lists five districts on the international border, adding Phalodi. Phalodi's westernmost point is at 71° 43′ E, with Jaisalmer's Ramgarh, Sam and Pokaran tehsils between it and Pakistan, and a latitude-by-latitude scan of the state's boundary file returns only Barmer, Jaisalmer, Bikaner and Sri Ganganagar on the western frontier. The four names this chapter has always carried stand.

5. The smallest district is corrected. This page previously left the question open and recorded Dholpur as the answer keyed to the older map. On the 41-district map the smallest district is Khairthal-Tijara, about 2,020 sq km measured, ahead of Deeg at about 2,145 sq km. Deeg is widely taught as the answer and is the runner-up. Because no Government of Rajasthan area table for the current districts was located, this rests on measurement of the state's own polygons and is quoted as such, with the margin between the two stated.

6. Two formation dates in circulation are contradicted by Government of Rajasthan documents. The Rajasthan Foundation's district profiles, each sourced on its own first page to the District Census Handbook 2011, Part XII-A, give Baran and Rajsamand as constituted on 10 April 1991 where 9 April circulates, and Karauli as established on 1 March 1997 where 19 July 1997 circulates. The Karauli difference is probably not an error in either source: an announcement, a notification and an inauguration are three events, and a single date for "the creation of a district" is quoting one of them without saying which. Pratapgarh, 26 January 2008, as the 33rd district, is stated in the same series and is not in dispute. These profiles contain demonstrable typographical errors elsewhere — the Pratapgarh profile prints latitudes that would place the district in Sri Ganganagar — so they are used only for the formation sentences.

7. The length attributed to the Aravalli on this page has been corrected. The about 692 km taken from the Rajasthan Foundation was attached here to a Guru Shikhar-to-Khetri course. That length belongs to the whole ridge across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi, which the Supreme Court's order of 20 November 2025 defines as "the continuous geological ridge extending from Gujarat to Delhi" and which the Aravalli Green Wall Project treats as a four-state landscape of over six million hectares. The Rajasthan share of that length is not settled here: 550 km circulates and no government source for it was found.

8. New primary sources on the geology. PIB, Ministry of Mines, 9 March 2016, the annexure to a Rajya Sabha reply, is the source for the ten Rajasthan geo-heritage sites / national geological monuments declared by the Geological Survey of India as that reply enumerated them in March 2016 — the most of any state in that file, counted from the annexure itself — including "Great Boundary Fault at Satur, Bundi District" and Akal Fossil Wood Park, Jaisalmer. The structural description of the Great Boundary Fault — the north-western limit of the Vindhyan basin, a 30 km wide north-west dipping thrust traced to 30 km depth along the Chandli–Bundi–Kota–Kunjer profile — is from B. Rajendra Prasad and V. Vijaya Rao, "Deep seismic reflection study over the Vindhyans of Rajasthan", Journal of Earth System Science 115(1), 2006, pp. 135-147 (Indian Academy of Sciences). Tharosaurus indicus is from Bajpai, Datta, Pandey, Ghosh, Kumar and Bhattacharya, "Fossils of the oldest diplodocoid dinosaur suggest India was a major centre for neosauropod radiation", Scientific Reports 13 (2023), by authors at IIT Roorkee and the Geological Survey of India, read at PMC10403599; the paper's claim is that it is the earliest known diplodocoid globally, which is narrower than the "world's oldest dinosaur" wording in circulation, and the article carries a published correction of 21 August 2023. The Ramgarh structure's dimensions are from Thomas Kenkmann, Gerwin Wulf and Amar Agarwal, "Ramgarh, Rajasthan, India: A 10 km diameter complex impact structure", Meteoritics & Planetary Science 55(4), 2020, pp. 936-961, doi:10.1111/maps.13454 — the authors the state's gazette credits for its own geological map — whose abstract states that "the annular collar does not mark the crater rim but represents the outer part of a central uplift of an approximately 10 km diameter complex impact structure", with a stratigraphic uplift of about 1,000 m, and reports planar deformation features in quartz confirming the impact origin. That is why the state's 3.2 km and the literature's 10 km are both right: they measure different features. The paper also reports gastropods of Middle Jurassic age in the crater's diamictite, which it says may indicate the time of the impact — consistent with, though not proof of, the 165-million-year age the gazette states.

9. A refutation prepared for this revision was itself wrong, and is reversed here. The working draft for this page held that Ramgarh crater, in Baran district, is not a declared geo-heritage site, on the ground that it does not appear in the Ministry of Mines' state-wise annexure. That annexure is dated 9 March 2016 and Ramgarh was declared eight years later, so it could not have refuted anything. The Government of Rajasthan's Department of Environment and Climate Change declared the Ramgarh Crater a National Geo-Heritage Site, in consultation with the Geological Survey of India, by notification S.O. 579 of 16 March 2024, published in the Rajasthan Gazette Extraordinary of 19 March 2024, pp. 1144-1146 (file F 8(4) ENV/2023/Part-1), which was downloaded and read in full. The declaration is now on this page as a sourced fact, with the gazette's own location (Ramgarh village, Kishanganj tehsil, not the Mangrol that the draft carried), co-ordinates, 3.2 km diameter, 165-million-year age, and the conservation-reserve and wetland protections it recites. What does survive of the refutation is narrower and is stated on the page: Ramgarh is not India's or Rajasthan's first geo-heritage site, because ten Rajasthan sites were already on the 2016 list and Akal Fossil Wood Park among them was recognised decades earlier. The lesson is the one this site's rules already state: a source that predates a claim cannot refute it, and the date of the file must be checked against the date of the thing it is being used to deny.

10. The desertification figures are from the atlas itself, not from secondary reporting. The Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas of India (Space Applications Centre, ISRO, released 17 June 2021, about 95 MB) was downloaded and its state-wise tables read: Rajasthan 2,12,37,665 hectares, 62.06%, in 2018-19; 62.90% in 2011-13 and 63.19% in 2003-05; all-India 9,78,54,851 hectares, 29.77%, in 2018-19. 62.06% is a 2018-19 measurement published in 2021 and must be quoted with the measurement year, not the release year.

11. The Aravalli entries in the Nowadays section are expanded from the same PIB factsheet, read in full. Added: the 20 November 2025 date of the Supreme Court's final judgment; the origin of the 100-metre criterion in a 2002 Government of Rajasthan committee report relying on the Richard Murphy landform classification, in force in the state since 9 January 2006; the finding that only Rajasthan had a formal definition among the four states consulted; the committee's addition of explicit protection for ranges, which Rajasthan's own definition lacked; the requirement to mark hills and ranges on Survey of India maps before mining is considered; and the exception for critical, strategic and atomic minerals under the First and Seventh Schedules of the MMDR Act, 1957. The PIB release of 14 January 2026 adds the National Conference on Eco-restoration of the Aravalli Landscape, the 6.45 million hectares identified and 2.7 million hectares where work has begun, the 29 implementing districts, and the four tiger reserves and 18 protected areas in the landscape. Two official district counts for the Aravallis are printed side by side — 37 recognised, 29 implementing — because they measure different things.

12. Two items this page previously parked as "not yet covered" are now partly covered. District areas are given, as measurements from the state's boundary file rather than as published figures, and the closing paragraph above should be read with that qualification. The geology of the Aravalli is covered only to the extent that the Geological Survey of India has declared and described it: the Great Boundary Fault, the ten geo-heritage sites and the Jaisalmer basin's Jurassic record. The age and stratigraphy of the Aravalli itself remain uncovered and unasserted, because no GSI publication setting them out could be reached.

13. One measurement was prepared for this revision and is not published, because it failed our own check. The working draft carried a list of 13 districts said to touch no state boundary at all, derived by testing each district against the outer ring of the state's tehsil polygons. The list omits Bhilwara and Phalodi, both of which are enclosed entirely by other Rajasthan districts — Bhilwara by Ajmer, Beawar, Rajsamand, Chittorgarh, Bundi and Tonk; Phalodi by Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur and Nagaur. A boundary-touch test run on generalised polygons will report a false touch wherever two neighbouring polygons fail to close exactly against each other, and that is the likeliest explanation. The count of landlocked districts is therefore not asserted on this page, in either direction. The same polygon layer's area and extent measurements are retained, because they do not depend on the polygons meeting exactly, and because the smallest-district result was separately checked against published district areas and agrees with them.

Links in this revision were checked and resolving on 29 August 2026, each against its final URL rather than its first, with a control request to confirm the checks themselves were not being blocked. Three of them were not merely checked but re-read for this revision — the Ministry of Mines' 2016 annexure, the Rajasthan Gazette notification of 16 March 2024, and the impact-structure paper — because the claims resting on them were the ones this revision changed. One exception is recorded rather than hidden: the publisher's page for the impact-structure paper refuses automated requests, so that reference is given as a full citation with its DOI and is the one link in this revision we could not machine-verify. Its title, publication details and full abstract were retrieved and read from a bibliographic index, and the sentence quoted on this page is the abstract's own wording; the full text behind the paywall was not reached. The state's own gazette credits these three authors for its geological map, which is why the paper is cited here at all.

Still not asserted after this revision: the sub-regional schemes of the Thar, the Bangar belt, the Aravalli and the Hadoti plateau; the peak, plateau and pass heights; the dune typology and its district distribution; the district-wise interstate border lists and their lengths; how many districts touch no state boundary; the extreme-point villages and the geographical centre of the state; the scholarly theories of the desert's origin; the rock supergroup succession; Zawar's standing as a geo-heritage site; and the wider regional-name vocabulary. Each is listed in the Aggregator Watch box above with what was checked and what was found.